a person who farms; person who operates a farm or cultivates land.
Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. an unsophisticated or ignorant person, especially one from a rural area.
Archaic. a person who undertakes some service, as the care of children or poor people, at a fixed price.
Archaic. a person who undertakes the collection of taxes, duties, etc., paying a fixed sum for the privilege of retaining them.
Cards.
a variety of twenty-one played with a 45-card pack, the object being to obtain cards having a total worth of 16.
the dealer in this game.
Fannie (Merritt) 1857–1915, U.S. authority on cooking.
James (Leonard), 1920–1999, U.S. civil rights leader; founder of CORE.
a person who operates or manages a farm
a person who obtains the right to collect and retain a tax, rent, etc, or operate a franchise for a specified period on payment of a fee
a person who looks after a child for a fixed sum
The word farmer has been used as a derogatory term for an ignorant or unsophisticated person, especially one from a rural area (whether an actual farmer or not), since the 1800's. A couple of citations illustrate this. One early example is found in Artie by George Ade (1896): “I may be a farmer, but it takes better people than you to sling the bull con into me,” uttered by the title character Artie, who is a young office worker and not a farmer. A book review in The Guardian (August 21, 2001) shows a more recent use: “I worked in a couple of those bars where you hustle champagne. They were businessmen, they weren't naive farmers.”
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English fermer, fermour, from Anglo-French, Old French fermier “collector of revenue,” from Medieval Latin firmārius “one who holds lands or tenement for a fixed number of years or for life”; see origin at farm, -er 2
A farmer is a person who runs and works on a farm. Some farmers raise a variety of food crops, while others keep dairy cows and sell their milk. Farmers work in some aspect of agriculture, growing vegetables, grains, or fruit; or raising animals for milk, eggs, or meat. A small farmer manages a relatively small piece of land, often growing different crops and keeping hens for their eggs, for example. Some farmers own their farms, while others rent the land on which they work. In the 14th century, a farmer was "one who collects taxes," from the Old French fermier, "lease holder."
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
One farmer on the north coast said he lost up to 80 percent of his cane-cutting workforce virtually overnight.
From Barron's ● Jul. 26, 2026
A farmer and lobbyist, Sell disclosed four farms, worth a combined total of $1.25 million to $2.5 million.
From Salon ● Jul. 24, 2026
There was one exception, a blue-collar oyster farmer and Marine veteran named Graham Platner.
From Slate ● Jul. 24, 2026
“Go to the farmers market, buy local if you can, where you know a farmer in your area has grown that directly.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 2026
“The farmer could never relax,” she went on.
From "A Girl Named Disaster" by Nancy Farmer
Farmer Gareth Wyn Jones, whose land borders the Conwy Mountain, said he had "never seen anything of that scale".
From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026
“The circumstances are different between the two states,” said David Farmer, a Maine-based Democratic strategist, “but it’s certainly shaping up to be a strange midterm election with enormous stakes for the country.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 12, 2026
Party wings are another reliable crowd-pleaser: Farmer Focus wings come pre-split, grill quickly and only need a coating of Tabañero BBQ sauce near the end so it can caramelize and get sticky.
From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2026
While meeting with Fifth Third employees in the Cincinnati area, Farmer has been repeatedly asked if he likes Cincinnati chili – and if so, how he likes it prepared.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 6, 2026
But after our dinner I found myself keeping a distance from Paul Farmer, mainly, I came to realize, because his uneasy.
From "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder and Michael French
Griffith and other farmers at the market said that a large majority of their customers use EBT.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 28, 2026
Rather than send wheat to Minneapolis to be processed, incurring high transportation costs, farmers and the state banded together to form the North Dakota Mill, the only state-owned mill in the United States.
From Salon ● Jul. 26, 2026
The service said local farmers had been assisting crews by using tractors to create fire breaks and help them contain the fire.
From BBC ● Jul. 24, 2026
So it seems likely that farmers will get substantially more subsidies that would increase total federal farm payments in 2026 to between $66 billion and $70 billion.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 24, 2026
Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
